Graphic Design Books

As part of my research into layout I have decided to look at the layout of some books on Graphic Design, as you'd expect the layouts in books based on Graphic Design to be examples of "good" layout.

100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design

Triangulation

The topic of this page was triangulation. It was admittedly the first page I opened the book on, and I thought that the 3 column grid was used to reflect the 3 sides in a triangle, or at least I thought this optimistically. It seemed to me thought that nothing else was based on the content of the page in terms of the layout, which was surprising to me, given how much it had been emphasised after our crit that content should inform layout in good design. I find it almost hypocritical on the books behalf.

Comic Lettering

I then found a page on comic lettering, which used the same 3 column grid, and this confirmed to me that the 3 columns in the triangulation page wasn't inspired by the 3 sides on a triangle, and instead is something designed to look aesthetically pleasing. The use of the exact same page layout except for the fact that it's reversed suggests no consideration of the layout with respect to the content, and this is the same with every page in the book.

The A-Z Of Visual Ideas

Building A Bigger Picture

This page I found to be quite simple in it's reflection of page content in that the 4 column grid on the right page suggests smaller widths of text coming together to produce a bigger one. This is also the case with the images (and their captions on the left page), smaller ones are used in a column next to the larger one which suggest smaller things coming together to be the same size as a bigger thing.

Counter-Intuition

To confirm that this wasn't just the general grid system throughout the whole book as was the case with the previous book, I then looked at the counter-intuition page. Again, this one is quite simple. The 2 column grid is used where previously there was a 4 column grid, and this relates to 2 sides of an argument or 2 opposing forces. In context everything has an opposite, dark to light etc, hence the 2 columns. The right page is quite busy, whereas the left page uses a lot more whitespace, which again shows counter acting. 

I broke down the two layouts used in the A-Z of Visual Ideas book I looked at for potential ideas to use as a grid system. Black boxes indicate text, and red indicates and image or caption.